melmer

The Witcher 3: What Geralt Wants

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Really? I'm on a 970 too and have things spread between medium and high, and I'm still getting these fairly regular drops of 5-10FPS for a second or so when moving around in the world. I'm not sure whether it's a streaming issue or what. The actual stable framerate is good, but then like I said I get these brief sudden drops for no reason.

Yeah, I'm not sure what your problem might be. I'm on a 970 and have everything on Ultra except for Foliage Distance (High) and Hairworks (Off). It seems like Hairworks is the biggest drain though, maybe check that you don't have that on? Even on "Geralt Only" it took 10-15 frames off.

 

 

Overall, I'm in love with this game. I was a big fan of the first two, but this is just some next level stuff. I'm even loving the combat, which I know some people have had issues with. I'm playing on Blood and Broken Bones, and aside from the opening hour or so when I was relying on food for health and had no oils yet, It's been great. It really forces me to use all the tools I have available to me. Stumbling on a nest of Ghouls isn't just a situation I can run in and clear out easily. I'll camp out on the outskirts, pull up my bestiary and see what they're weak to, then I'll set up my potions and oils accordingly, and have to be really strategic in how I handle the encounter. Loads of fun!

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After updating my drivers and messing with settings I managed to get 45-50 fps on medium-ish settings with my 670.

 

But I think I might get a new video card anyway, with my next paycheck. It makes me sad when I think about what it could look like. ):

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After updating my drivers and messing with settings I managed to get 45-50 fps on medium-ish settings with my 670.

But I think I might get a new video card anyway, with my next paycheck. It makes me sad when I think about what it could look like. ):

Food for thought - there are new ATI cards hitting this summer that are claiming they have comparable performance to a Titan At the high end.

Who knows if that is true, but they'll certainly drive prices down on existing GPUS. You could likely save a ton of money if you waited until black Friday or so.

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Yeah I'm getting better at dodging. I'm still very squishy, but I can reliably dodge a lot of attacks. The parry still feels weird, but I don't feel I need it considering I can dodge.

I'm also getting the hang of switching up magic and using the appropriate spell. They all feel pretty weak though except for the shield spell.

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So, I just finally started Witcher 2. I played through the somewhat buggy tutorial, and it decided that I should play on easy. Defiant, I started the game on Normal anyway, and then promptly died twice in the second fight in the game (at the ballista in the courtyard.) Sheepishly, I dropped back to the main menu and lowered the difficulty to easy, but now it seems that shields don't matter and one guy can hammer on me for 30 seconds straight and not even get me down to half of my life.

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I decided to look at a few videos that other people had made of the Witcher 3 on various platforms, and it has eased my concerns about my GPU's performance. I was initially worried because the intro movie was very hitchy, but it seems to have been hitchy for everyone. I put a load of settings on Ultra, and things seem to be running along nicely.

 

I completed the first big mission, spent a little while in the second area, but exploration kept butting me up against skull-rated enemies, so I decided to go back to the first area for a while and fully explore there before going back to the second place.

 

I was initially thrown by the changes to alchemy: now you make each potion once, and it gets refilled by meditating so long as you have hard alcohol. I've made some bombs and oils too, but am not sure how they restock.

 

I'm getting used to fighting too, mixing up stabbing and melting and forcefielding and shooting, along with dodging; I really like that they put the thought into big rolly dodges and small sidesteppy dodges

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So, I just finally started Witcher 2. I played through the somewhat buggy tutorial, and it decided that I should play on easy. Defiant, I started the game on Normal anyway, and then promptly died twice in the second fight in the game (at the ballista in the courtyard.) Sheepishly, I dropped back to the main menu and lowered the difficulty to easy, but now it seems that shields don't matter and one guy can hammer on me for 30 seconds straight and not even get me down to half of my life.

 

That was my experience with the Witcher 2 as well. Never finished the game, just jumped into the Witcher 3 and enjoying it a lot more (playing on normal difficulty too).

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That was my experience with the Witcher 2 as well. Never finished the game, just jumped into the Witcher 3 and enjoying it a lot more (playing on normal difficulty too).

 

At the moment I don't have the cash for Witcher 3 anyway, and it sounds like the politics stuff (which is the part that I really loved in the first one) in Witcher 2 is pretty awesome. I'm generally pretty good at games, I don't understand what is up with the Witcher games that just doesn't click with me. I guess I'm going to stick with easy, since I remember how much of a struggle it was to get through the first Witcher and I'd hate to get 3/4s of the way through and get stuck.

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Ok, I'm getting used to the weirdly fast tree animations. Also, turned out the player animation speed just seemed too fast because I had toggled on run with Ctrl. I've been alternating between keyboard+mouse and the PS3 controller and both work fine. Maybe I even prefer the keyboard as it makes more shortcuts available.

 

The game is really good now that I'm getting used to some of the quirks. I started doing some of the side quests in the first village, even though I didn't plan to at first. It's cool that some of them require detective stuff, even if it's just linearly following a trail, brings out the best moments of Geralt as a medieval detective in the previous games. I hope the whole game will have a lot of this, and perhaps more complex with some actual puzzles. Also made me think of Anachronox, even though I don't remember how much detective stuff there really was in that awesome game.

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I decided to look at a few videos that other people had made of the Witcher 3 on various platforms, and it has eased my concerns about my GPU's performance. I was initially worried because the intro movie was very hitchy, but it seems to have been hitchy for everyone. I put a load of settings on Ultra, and things seem to be running along nicely.

 

I completed the first big mission, spent a little while in the second area, but exploration kept butting me up against skull-rated enemies, so I decided to go back to the first area for a while and fully explore there before going back to the second place.

 

I was initially thrown by the changes to alchemy: now you make each potion once, and it gets refilled by meditating so long as you have hard alcohol. I've made some bombs and oils too, but am not sure how they restock.

 

I'm getting used to fighting too, mixing up stabbing and melting and forcefielding and shooting, along with dodging; I really like that they put the thought into big rolly dodges and small sidesteppy dodges

 

Far as I can tell, you restock anything made in alchemy by meditation. Even just one hour does it.

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I belive you will restock any and all depleted potions upon rest IF you have one of the alcohol reagents; it consumes one of then.

So actually you're kind of encouraged to drink potions frequently because it costs just as much to replenish one as it does to replenish your whole stock.

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I belive you will restock any and all depleted potions upon rest IF you have one of the alcohol reagents; it consumes one of then.

So actually you're kind of encouraged to drink potions frequently because it costs just as much to replenish one as it does to replenish your whole stock.

 

Yup! That's how it worked for me.

 

I'm starting to fall for this game now. Initially I was quite cool on it, it just felt like another open world WRPG like Skyrim or Dragon Age, but it's pretty different. The writing is straight up better than those, and I love how I'm not pursuing any end of the world bullshit. Just going around as a monster bounty hunter.

 

The only thing I don't like now is the character designs. Geralt looks super dumb.

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I decided to look at a few videos that other people had made of the Witcher 3 on various platforms, and it has eased my concerns about my GPU's performance. I was initially worried because the intro movie was very hitchy, but it seems to have been hitchy for everyone. I put a load of settings on Ultra, and things seem to be running along nicely.

 

Yeah, the intro movie is kinda dodgy in terms of framerate. If you experience trouble with cutscenes in general, you can go into the bin\config\base folder within the game folder and open visuals.ini, then change MovieFramerate to 60.

 

Apparently that can cause problems with performance for some people though, unless they disable the ubersampling setting below.

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I have dropped about 3-4 hours on Witcher 3, and after having loved Witcher 2 I am very cool on this one.

 

The open world seems to have led to a dilution of the strong story telling from 2, maybe I need to play more of it so that it becomes a little more thematically clear but it just seems to lack the rich side missions of the previous game and resorted to a Red Dead Redemption/Skyrim formula (AKA: boring as watching paint dry) that just means that I am not invested in it.

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I have dropped about 3-4 hours on Witcher 3, and after having loved Witcher 2 I am very cool on this one.

 

The open world seems to have led to a dilution of the strong story telling from 2, maybe I need to play more of it so that it becomes a little more thematically clear but it just seems to lack the rich side missions of the previous game and resorted to a Red Dead Redemption/Skyrim formula (AKA: boring as watching paint dry) that just means that I am not invested in it.

 

I feel like it has as strong of story telling, you just have to travel a little bit during the story and if you don't like the open world nature, this might not be for you.

 

 

On another note:

 

Killing from horse back feels so good, hah.

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I am really impressed by the weather effects, hear and seen even trees moving in a rain storm is amazing (even on low).

 

I don´t know if intentional or not, but you know the battlefield area close to the White Orchard village? that place with the mud, pools of water, wooden stakes and the way the bodies where arranged kind remaind me of the end of the movie Henry V.

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I just about lost it yesterday (well I've been packing for an intercontinental move and am feeling the strain) when one of the story cutscenes was punctuated with two rabbits vigorously humping in the background :D! I'm not sure whether it was just in the scene and rendered real time or intentional, but it was great :P!

 

I'm back in the second area, still having NOPE NOPE NOPE moments when explorin (and running away), but having a fantastic time; I'm really into it now. Cruel really, since I have to sell my monitor next week, and my laptop won't run it... it will probably be a wee while before I get the chance to play again, so will make the most of this holiday weekend

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Dr. Wookie, definitely intentional, I caught that bit too!

 

So relieved I finally found a blacksmith, my weapons and armor were in such rough shape.

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that rabbit gag was really surreal for me; one of the rabbits started levitating by furiously humping air and ended the cutscene about 5 feet straight up.

 

I also started dialog with a stack of wood - which Geralt was quite nonchalant about - because it was revealed to actually be a young girl who joined the conversation by slowly sliding face first out of the wall.

 

so basically what I'm saying is that the glitches I've encountered so far have been net improvements to the game.

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and the monster designs in this game are great, in a sort of horrifying-german-fairytale way. Lots of scabs and gross potbellies and everything looks like it absolutely reeks. Water hags even take gross potbelly to the next level by having accompanied gross hanging boobs! I'm really excited to get deeper in to discover new monsters.

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While th monsters are great, I'm not so keen on having high level versions look identical to lower level versions. I've cone across level twenty something ghouls that I rocked up on and got one-shotted.

Also, I had my first go with Ciri last night

She is much more mobile than Geralt, but lacking many of his tricks. I don't know if it's just because it's early on, but all I could do was thwack with my one sword, and teleport-dodge. Maybe more powers will be unlocked later.

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Holy shit this game is huge and beautiful and good! Really enjoying my time so far.

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Holy shit this game is huge and beautiful and good! Really enjoying my time so far.

 

Yeah it's outstanding so far. I'm normally someone who puts 5-20 hours into games per week (depending on other commitments) across a wide variety of games; I normally play between 2 and 4 different games in any given week.

 

This week? Despite work being heavy I've clocked 20 hours in The Witcher 3 and haven't touched another game, and I've still got Sunday ahead of me! :)

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There's two bugs in the 1.0.2 or 1.2 version I've seen.

 

1. There's a quest on the Skellige Isles called the King's Gambit, has an infinite loading screen bug in the middle of it. Haven't found any fixes.

 

2. You can buy respec potions for 1000 off merchants. You can also eat food to regen and it'll equip the next food item when one stack runs out. It'll equip the respec potion as well.

 

It's actually not buggy at all, the trees sway in the wind! Riding looks exciting if it's raining.

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While th monsters are great, I'm not so keen on having high level versions look identical to lower level versions. I've cone across level twenty something ghouls that I rocked up on and got one-shotted.

Also, I had my first go with Ciri last night

She is much more mobile than Geralt, but lacking many of his tricks. I don't know if it's just because it's early on, but all I could do was thwack with my one sword, and teleport-dodge. Maybe more powers will be unlocked later.

 

She isn't a fully trained witcher so it makes sense, the mobility comes from some sort of inner-power, should be interesting to see more of her.

 

Currently with a certain bloody baron, and getting wrecked in the botchling fight/transport, might have to kick it down a step difficulty wise. 

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